Volume 28, Number 3 · March 5, 1981
The Condemned
By Jack Henry Abbott
Slow Coming Dark: Interviews on Death Row
by Doug Magee
Pilgrim Press, 181 pp., $10.95
It was during the first years in prison that I gradually became aware of them. They seemed to be eccentrics at the time; some were suspected of stealthy perversions, some seemed to go about as if they were part of the prison staff. They were the most educated—and the most vulnerable of us all. They were all shy and careful men who seemed to be ashamed of the rest of us. There were only about ten of them but they were easily indentifiable: they had all served about twenty years apiece; each was a man whose death sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment. They had left death row at least a decade earlier and now were men in their late middle-age—all on the threshold of old age.
Review, 4556 words
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